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Monday, November 18, 2013

The Billionaires Are Upset With Us Again

The advocacy group backed by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is launching a new round of ads aimed at keeping the pressure on Congress to pass immigration reform.

The
ads from Silicon Valley’s FWD.us — backed by executives from Google,
Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Instagram and Dropbox — highlight what the groups
says is bipartisan support for swift movement on legislation.

FWD.us said the videos are "part of a large national buy, targeting cable and online outlets across the country."

“With this new round of ads, we want to make clear to Washington that
delay on critical immigration reforms is unacceptable,” FWD.us President
Joe Green said in a statement...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg’s attempts to increase the availability of H-1B visas.

“Mark
Zuckerberg made a glaring omission from his ad: the tech lobby’s push
for a large increase in temporary guest workers to replace American
workers – a central pillar of the Senate bill,” a spokesman for Sessions
said Monday.

The billionaires are upset that they haven't managed to drive software engineering wages down to $10 per hour. It isn't like anyone is really hiring Americans anyway. And those people who work at unskilled or semiskilled jobs? The billionaires won't be happy until that bunch is literally at the "will work for food" stage.

3 comments:

I was long an advocate of free trade. But... having seen what globalization has done to labor in the US, I'm sure having second thoughts.

On immigration, you're right. The billionaires want to let in lots of cheap labor. Sadly, they tend to get ideological support from Libertarians, who don't understand at all the concept of nationhood or citizenship.